An Organizational Discourse Study of Public Managers’ Struggles with Collaboration across the Daycare Area

Plotnikof, Mie(Frederiksberg, 2015)

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Resume:

This doctoral study explores problematics of managing and organizing collaborative
governance from an organizational discourse perspective. Collaborative governance
is a public management practice developing currently with the aim of engaging
stakeholders to address and co-create potential solutions to complex public problems,
such as policy and service innovation. This is seen as a potential shift between new
public management (NPM) and new public governance (NPG) discourses in the
governance literature. Pursuing collaborative governance in practice is not taken to be
an easy task, as it involves changes from hierarchical organizing towards
interorganizational collaboration in networks and partnerships. The literature
therefore discusses both the potentials and problems, and conceptualizes their issues
in organizational models of design and implementation issues, and new managerial
roles. These issues are approached as managerial challenges and unfolded in terms of
paradoxes, socially dynamic tensions and power relations – especially by one stream
of studies. They stress the need to understand challenges of collaborative governance
practice by approaching the emerging social interactions and power relations;
however, the theorization of communication and discursive aspects to do so is underdeveloped.

In this paper an analytic scope is elaborated in order to unpack the complexities of constitutive dynamics co-producing managerial subjects in discursive practices of public management work (my empirical field). Such framing is proposed in order to grasp the dynamic complexity of multi-modal, power-infused processes of subject formations, that is, the significant discursive practices through which different enacting forces constitute selves, actions, procedures and/or materials as managerial matters with specific normative effects. In this view managerial subjectivity becomes a question of analysing power-infused processes of active and passive performing subject formations that manage meanings of managerial matter, selves, affect conditions of actions and ways of organizing. Public management work is an interesting field to such; with the rapid changes seen in many OECD-countries, embedded managerial subjects and relating phenomena become in fluxes of binary tensions between shifting modernization discourses (e.g. in terms of ‘New Public Management’ or ‘New Public Governance’). With such the significance of formal managers are often stressed to changing ways of organizing (Bislev et al. 2002, Pedersen & Hartley 2008). But how do certain ‘selves’, ‘doings’, ‘things’ come to matter managerially in everyday management work, managing meanings and conditions of selves, others and actions? By analysing the socially embedded co-productions of managerial work, we can nuance research accounts on the performance of manageability in organizing processes. But grasping such complexity calls for discourse analytics sensitive to social-psychological aspects of constitutive dynamics, a need this paper contributes to.